Paint These Sentences With Music

When Martin Laps moved his family from Stockholm to the Swedish countryside town of Simrishamn, he found the same problem he'd left behind. Students weren't reading. "It is clear that kids don't read as much as they should," Laps said. "Teachers are facing the fact that literature and reading no longer have a role in students' lives." Language development was slipping too, and the usual fixes hadn't moved the needle.

Music class had its own version of the same resistance. Sweden's music education stayed anchored to instruments, and the software Laps had tried before Soundtrap was clunky enough that even a trained musician found it hard to put in front of a room of kids.

Martin Laps discovered Soundtrap for Education through the Make Music Matter program at Linnaeus University, and he's been a member since the program's start. His first reaction was skepticism. Swedish music class had always been built around instruments, and the browser-based tools he'd tried before were hard for students to navigate. Soundtrap changed his mind. "You tell Soundtrap what you want it to do, and the program helps you make beats and loops fit with the music in your mind," he said.

When Sweden's school reform put Laps in the First Teacher role, responsible for development across his school, he used the position to connect subjects that had never shared a lesson plan. "When I sat down to plan my project as the First Teacher, I instantly knew what I would do. I was going to connect literature with the school subjects art, literature, and social sciences using Soundtrap."

The centerpiece was built with the Tim Bergling Foundation, which gives students access to Avicii's music through the Make Music Matter Project. Laps assigned a remix project using "Wake Me Up" and "Without You," asking students to build original songs around Sandro Cavazza's recorded vocal loops from "Without You," after a class discussion of what the lyrics meant.

A subject that traveled. Once Laps found Soundtrap's podcast feature, the project stopped being a music-class experiment. Colleagues with no musical background picked it up for their own lessons. In one, students between ten and twelve years old researched a topic in groups, recorded a podcast about their findings, then listened to another group's podcast and recorded feedback inside Soundtrap. "I discovered the podcast feature and did Soundtrap work with many subjects simultaneously," Laps said. "I'm a strong believer that school education can be more than textbooks."

Reading, rebuilt as sound. To close the reading gap he'd first noticed as a new teacher, Laps gave students sentences pulled from a book and asked them to paint the sentences with music. Assigning a sound to a sentence forced students to sit with what it meant, not just what it said. The exercise split memorizing from understanding, and gave students a way to carry the emotion of a text into their own work.

Laps has kept writing and recording through all of it. He's published two children's books and released his own music, including the single "Vad Vet Jag" with Soulmate Sisters. "Soundtrap is a dream for music creators," he said. "It is not only a platform for music creators, but it is a platform for literature, science, or discussions."